Ye may learn by the stars and the sun
Shining on cities so bright,

If the welkin hangs dreary and dun,
To wait in the mist for the light.

So too, the calm sea, glassy-grey,

The southwind all grimly makes riot,

And whirlpools in strife stir away

The whale-pool that once was so quiet.

So also, outwelleth a spring,

All clear from the cliff and all cool,
Till midway some mountain may fling
A rock to roll into the pool.

Then broken asunder will seem

The rill so clear-running before,
That brook is turn'd out of its stream,
And flows in its channel no more.

So now, in thy darkness of mind,

Thou willest my wisdom to spurn,
Withstanding, by trouble made blind,
The lessons thou never wilt learn.

Yet now, if ye will, as ye may,

Let

The true and pure light clearly know,
go the vain joys of to-day,

The weal that brings nothing but woe.

And drive away bad unbelief,

The fears of the world and its care,

And be not thou given to grief,

Nor yield up thy mind to despair.

Nor suffer thou glad-going things

To puff thee with over-much pride,
Nor worldliness lifting thy wings

To lure thee from meekness aside:

And let not, too weakly again,

Ills make thee despair of the good,
When hunted by peril and pain,
And haunted by misery's brood.

For always the mind of a man

Is bound up with trouble below,

If riches or poverty can

Engraft it with sin or with woe.

Because the twin evils make dun

The mind in a misty swart shroud,

That on it eternity's sun

Is dim till it scatters the cloud.

It really is a pity to rob Alfred of his originality by representing all or any of these poems as servile translations from Boethius, or

even free paraphrases. The truth is, a good deal of ingenuity is required to discover in many cases a resemblance at all. Alfred has taken up the tune of Boethius, and begins a theme in the key-note of the Latin, but is soon hurried away by the rapidly recurring alliterations of his own free harp and tongue and so becomes original. With respect to Anglo-Saxon poetry, in most instances it is far from an easy task to discover much regularity of rhythm, or anything like exactitude of rhyme. The present metre however is an exception; it pleases the eye and the ear alike. Generally speaking, doubtless, a great deal depended on the bardic harp and the inspiration of the moment: rhyme and rhythm which now in our ignorance escape us, and an alliterative jingle, which our modern taste despises, might have been made acceptable by stress and accent properly laid, by eloquent pauses and stirring bursts of Song. How meagre and dull, for instance, our God save the Queen' would look, if we knew nothing of the noble air to which it is set; and how much to further disadvantage would it be seen, if in the lapse of centuries transcribers had here and there omitted a rhyme or a line, or had jumbled them all together, so as to have hidden away the rhythm! Suppose such a case as that Mr Haynes Bayley may, centuries hence, (if this alov tasts so long,) find an editor to mark out one of his best songs in the following learned manner;

O no we never
mention her her

name is never

heard my lips are

now forbid to speak that

once familiar

word from sport

to sport......

This instance may provoke a smile, but it is instructive notwithstanding; possibly, the Junian manuscript and others may do our Alfred similar injustice; and, at any rate, the discoverer is still to arise who shall help us to the tunes which doubtless rendered all harmonious. Perhaps we know as yet very little about the matter: for example; Dr Hickes, one of our most learned scholars in this line, maintains that the Anglo-Saxon rhythm is reducible to the rules of Latin prosody: so ridiculous

does this seem to another equally distinguished man, Mr Tyrwhitt, the editor of Chaucer, that he does not scruple to say he can make out no metre at all in the so called poems, which are merely an inflated style of prose; while a more recent living writer, by way of reconciling such contrarieties, marks out his lines indeed with the symbols of dactyls, spondees, trochees, and anapæsts, but unluckily the words are too stubborn for his gratuitous prosody. The case seems to be, that the metres were very various; emphasis and harp-accompaniment made up for many a syllable; the thing would be monotonous in uninspired hands, but stirring enough under the touch of genius; which might rise or fall, be tender or impassioned, forte or piano, at its own free will. At present our wisdom is to take random shots at the true metre, if existing and discoverable at all, by translating Alfred into a great variety, as here done and for all else, the nearest approximation we can make seems to amount to such a play of words as 'whirlpool' and whalepool,'' scattered' and 'shattered' and the like; together with short staccato sentences; interweaved synonymes, and parallel phrases; and, now and then, a sort of dancing measure. The writer however throughout has desired to make the metrical part (whatever may have been his Parnassian pains in this respect,) a secondary matter: the first thing to be considered every where is the Wise King's mind and meaning.

And sang in soothful strain
The truths he had to tell.

When with clearest blaze

The bright sun shines in the sky,
The stars must quench their rays
Over the earth so high;

For that, set in the light

Of her that rules by day,
Their brightness is not bright,
But dimly dies away.

When the wind south-west

Under the cloud blows low,
Field-flowers wax their best
Fain to be glad and grow.

But when East and by North

The stark storm strongly blows,

Speedily drives he forth

All beauty from the rose.

So, with a stern needs-be

The northern blast doth dash

And beat the wide waste sea

That it the land may lash.

Alas, that ever on earth

Nothing is fast and sure;

No work is found so worth
That it for ever endure.

Very little need here he added, beyond the perpetual protest against the idea that Alfred does more than take hints from Boethius justice is done to neither side by the word translation, or even paraphrase: for Alfred often omits two thirds of Boethius, and makes up by two-thirds of his own. To shew how united our modern and ancient English are, there are nearly forty